Ferrari chief designer Nikolas Tombazis admits the team have missed opportunities in the opening rounds of the championship.

“If I was to score our overall performance, I would only give it a 6 out of 10,” said Tombazis.

“That’s for two main reasons: one is that we are not yet quite where we want to be. In the first four grands prix, we were not really able to fight for pole position and that is one of our main objectives at the moment.

“Secondly, if you look at the actual results, even if it’s true we’ve had a win, which naturally we can be very pleased about, we have also had two very bad results where we scored very few points. However, I reiterate, that overall, we can be optimistic for the future.”

However Tombazis added the team are “reasonably optimistic about the rest of the season”.

He said that the team had gleaned a lot of information from studying the car’s performance and his assessment of the car’s performance is more positive than 12 months ago: “We have seen that we have been stronger in certain conditions, both in terms of track type and weather, than in others – this includes looking at the type of corners, whether a circuit involves heavy braking and other similar parameters.”

“Overall, depending on the circuit, some of these strengths and weaknesses will be highlighted and therefore, based on what we have seen so far, we do not expect a constant performance level over the next few races, but rather we do expect to be reasonably competitive in most conditions.”